


Small Time Problems

by Flipdart



Category: Brennus - Tieshaunn
Genre: toybox
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-19
Updated: 2020-08-19
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:20:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25988089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flipdart/pseuds/Flipdart
Summary: Kira is a young, vulnerable Gadgeteer trying to protect her family full of petty minions in a world of superheroes.
Kudos: 1





	Small Time Problems

Kira popped three antacid stomach pills of her own design and downed them with a swig of caffeine-boosted coffee while she bent over her glassware distillery and teased out the first drop of her latest and greatest creation. 

A thin green goo oozed gently from the tip of her (borrowed) equipment, and she gathered the drop with a glass rod before holding it up to the lamplight with a manic smile. It was a beautiful, complex compound, elegant, the most sophisticated substance she'd made yet. She eagerly turned to her testing rig on the next bench. She had to see it at work.

A thick carpet square had been cut out and laid on the bench, then smeared with engine grease and grit. Besides it, a high powered gadget that looked like the love child of a vacuum cleaner, a hairdryer and a microwave was waiting. She flipped open the water tank lid and dumped the green goo inside.

Kira picked up the device, turned on the preheater, the microwave emitter and the suction pump and with gleeful energy made her first sweep over the carpet.

The thick layer of muck vanished after the first pass.

Kira exhaled a squeal of joy between grinning teeth and ran her fingers over the clean and dry carpet square in front of her. Perfect. Absolutely perfect. She'd created the perfect carpet cleaning system. This was huge.

She span around to her laptop and opened Toybox, entered her private chat and immediately typed out a brief message to her sponsor, grinning like a maniac and humming happy noises under her breath.

_ Commission complete. Test results exceed specified criteria on both manufacturing cost and effect. Test recording attached. Sale price will be two hundred thousand dollars. Please submit the funds to the Toybox smalltimer escrow account within the next three days or I will feel free to seek another buyer. _

Kira kicked back on her stool, forced her hands in her pockets as she jiggled around on the spot, waiting impatiently for the answer. Five days of borrowed laboratory time in the community college's tiny chemistry department, five hundred dollars of raw materials, a month of applied superpowered gadgeteering, not to mention the week it had taken beforehand to find an open commission on the Toybox forums that she felt she had a chance in hell in fulfilling. People regularly posted requests for power armour, railguns, healing salves, that ridiculous half-billion dollar bounty for anyone who could cure the Hawaii plague - but she didn't have a prayer of creating any of them. 

But an improved carpet cleaning compound? One that was cheaper, eco-friendly, and super effective? For  _ two hundred thousand dollars _ ? That, she could  _ do _ . She'd been so worried that someone else would beat her to the prize, but it was so... banal... that she'd bet no one else would lower themselves to even try. So much money, for something so.... small. She'd leapt at the prize.

And now she would, quite shortly, have more money than she'd had... well, since last year, when she'd proudly handed over the first two hundred thousand dollars she'd earned doing small commissions to her dad. 

She'd already manifested, at age thirteen, although she'd kept it secret. For a small enough talent, and Kira's was pretty minor, keeping it secret was both safer and easier to do. She'd already been a prodigal child, on a scholarship program since she was ten years old. Hiding her new creative impulses was the best protection she could get, considering how dangerously valuable Gadgeteering was. She'd hidden everything she could from almost everyone. 

But she'd found Toybox, and crept into the infamous online gadgeteers forum like a mouse entering the halls of Valhalla. It was a safe space, even for someone as vulnerable as her, because the security of Toybox was crafted by the finest Gadgeteers on the planet and guarded by titanically powerful figures. She'd started taking commissions like a rodent snatching crumbs, and the accumulated payouts had been growing in her bank account....

And then last year, she'd realised her parents, and her older brother and sister, had suddenly gotten desperate for money. But they wouldn't  _ tell _ her anything, because she was thirteen and in college already and they were all so damn  _ proud _ of her that none of them were willing to admit anything shameful in front of her, the golden child of the family. And her family had so much to be ashamed of that they'd more or less locked her on a pedestal and refused to talk about anything but how great everything was going, and how she should keep up her studies, and look for her future.... they loved her. She loved them. But they wouldn't tell her what was wrong!

Kira snapped her attention back to the laptop when it bipped at her. 

_ Looks good! Two hundred thousand dollars deposited in escrow pending satisfactory test results by the agreed third party. We may have questions later, can we contact you once we've had some time to review this? _

Yes! Done deal. Kira instantly uploaded the file she'd prepared that contained all her notes and instructions on production, complete with theoretical designs for large scale manufacturing, and sent it to the Middleman, an unknown but (much, much) higher powered gadgeteer who ran the smalltimer forums for limited talents like her. It was borderline charity work for a Gadgeteer like him, but the movers behind Toybox made a point of looking after their own on the site, especially the younger, more vulnerable Gadgeteers. Even capes and hoods co-operated to keep the Forums safe.

When she'd Manifested, she'd been so caught up in her new power, it had taken a long while before Kira noticed how bad things were back home; Her brother Jordan had started snatching bags and running with the street thugs again, and then Kira realized her big sister Myra had gotten a job in a strip club, and suddenly mum had gone back to working all night as a minion for Dead Wright, and dad spent all his time out drinking with his "buddies" and shouting at people on the phone whenever he was home...

She'd told her parents she could get them money. She'd called ahead, arranged to empty her new bank account into cash, and walked into the living room dragging a wheeled suitcase almost as big as she was. She had dumped it on the coffee table, unzipped it, turned it round and sat down. 

And.... dad had got up, looked at the cash. He'd been upset but, not crying, her dad wouldn't cry. He'd kissed her on the cheek, his stubble scratching her skin, took the suitcase of money by the handle, zipped it up and walked out. Her mom had cried. She didn't say anything, or answer when Kira asked what was wrong, she just cried. After a while, Kira hadn't been able to stand it, got up and sat next to her mom, cuddling. Later she'd fallen asleep.

And that had been that. They hadn't asked where she got the money. They hadn't talked about it afterwards, said thank you, told her why they needed it, or why it had been so important. It just wasn't discussed and somehow Kira didn't dare ask. She'd done something for them but they were too ashamed of what had happened to talk to her about it. She was locked out of her family's secret problems. It hurt.

Kira's family were crooks. Not villains, super or otherwise; they were petty crooks, minions, and thieves. Scum, by anyone's standards except hers. The kind of people who end up killed, in passing and without much attention, by Supervillains and Superheroes alike, because who cares about the henchmen and the minions? They were worthless. Their lives had no value to anyone, let alone the superhumans who all but ruled the world now.

But to her they were her dad. They were her mum, and her brother, and her sister. No matter how petty and small and shameful their lives were, they were her family. She was afraid for them constantly. She was terrified that one day the Heroes or the Syndicate would roll into town and her mom, her dad, her brother or sister, just wouldn't come home. She couldn't stop the fear and the way they refused to tell her anything just made it worse.

When she couldn't get answers Kira had resorted to spying. Toybox had a wealth of freely offered schematics for Gadgets of every type. She'd bugged her parent's room, the car, her dad's favourite bar, and even her mom's cat, Silver, by replacing her collar. It had taken a week to find out what was going on.

Her mom had been convicted in absentia for four murders. Her real name had been Karen Harding, and she'd been sentenced to life without parole fifteen years ago. Her dad.... her dad was worse. He'd stolen five million dollars.  _ From the Syndicate _ . Dead Wright had hidden the evidence and helped dad frame an old buddy, in exchange for regular payoffs and Gyle using his mob contacts for Dead Wright's gang. If the Syndicate ever found out they'd kill him slowly, gruesomely and publicly.

Kira had invented her super-antiacid stomach pills the same day she'd found that out. 

You could buy or trade for  _ anything _ on Toybox. Kira had run to the forum and found a Gadgeteer data hacker, calling himself Endzone. He offered new identities, the very best you could get. For two million dollars a head, he could build you a new life on the far side of the planet. He was elite, someone you only got access to through a community like Toybox. He had a waiting list. Kira had lied through her teeth about having the money and joined up.

Kira had seven people to protect. She needed fourteen million dollars before next year. She'd been working on commissions non-stop for three months now, and this stupid, silly little carpet cleaning thing was the biggest contract she'd succeeded on yet. She'd barely cracked a hundred thousand dollars so far. 

Kira packed up her gear for the night and cleaned and scrubbed the tiny, one room laboratory ready for the classes that would be crammed in here next morning. She rented the community college lab for twenty bucks a hour, plus replacement costs for materials. She dreamed, often and vividly, of having her own hidden lab somewhere secret. Somewhere to work, a proper lair.

It was never going to happen. Most of her contracts were ten to twenty grand payouts for minor stuff other Gadgeteers had got stuck on, and half of the ones she attempted failed after a few weeks of effort. Two hundred thousand for a fairly complex organic carpet cleaner was by far the best deal she'd seen yet. She could make money, but she had to make more. She needed to build her talent, make more valuable stuff, if she was going to look after her family.

Kira checked her Toybox account again on her laptop before she packed it up. The Middleman had relayed another set of questions from the buyer, who seemed to want to know everything from what authority had certified the chemical precursor purity levels to the ambient temperature, humidity and air pressure in the lab she worked in. It took another annoying hour and a half to answer them all, although considering they already handed the money to the Middleman, she was willing to take the time to answer them. If she was handing over two hundred grand, she'd be nervous too. By the time she was done it was gone eight o'clock and she was getting nervous about how dark it was getting. She hurried up and got going.

-

Kira was fourteen and far too young to drive, child prodigy or not. Her older sister Myra worked as "waitress" - kira winced at the painful lie again - at a club downtown not far from the college. It was cheaper and certainly safer than the almost non-existent public transport in Ratagan City and with all the hours Myra worked, the drive to college and back was the only time they ever had to talk to each other. Myra was the only one in the family who'd dared ask where Kira got the money from, and the only one who Kira had told. 

Kira walked the eight blocks from the shabby but respectable public square where the community college and city council sat, crossing into the run-down, blown up and thoroughly disreputable gang-controlled zone where the Hellcat Hole bar and grill squatted. 

Ratagan City was small, poor, and quite literally rented its heroes by the hour from Kansas City whenever the local supervillains got rowdy enough for the city to be forced to come up with the money to pay for it. Dead Wright, the only A- class within two hundred miles, more or less ran the city outright. Neither the baseline cops, or the city councillors, could possibly stand up to him and live. If he'd been the ambitious or abusive type, he probably would have drawn down someone from the national Hero teams strong enough to dislodge him, but he settled for slowly bleeding the place dry while keeping the peace. 

The Hellcat was a dive, but it was fully paid up with Dead Wright, had two full time D - class bricks working as bouncers, and was about as safe a place to work as you could find in the city. Kira walked up to the front, exchanged nods with Harry, the regular door-man and bouncer who she saw every day, and went straight to the fenced off employee car park at the back of the dive. She never went inside. It was bad enough seeing "Glory" topless on the flyers posted on the walls around the block, let alone imagining how her sister would react to Kira seeing her on stage.

She unlocked Myra's car and sat in the back seat with her schoolbag, reading up her course textbooks as she waited for Myra to finish her shift. It would take an hour or two, but the car was warm enough and she needed the time to keep up with her studies. Gadgeteering was a superpower; it didn't make her smarter, the power did all the work of inventing for her. She still had to keep up with her schoolwork all by herself.

Two dreaming hours of study later, her sister, leggy, blonde, buxom, and exhausted, knocked on the window and smiled at her beautiful, brilliant, blue-eyed baby sister. Kira smiled back, popped the door locks and let Myra get into the driver's seat up front. Myra was dressed for "work" and she always asked Kira to sit in the backseat rather than up front with her. She didn't like Kira looking at her after her shift. 

Myra smiled at her in the mirror. "Good day?" 

Kira was bouncing in the seat, eager to tell Myra about the money. "Great! I made a deal with this carpet company - I made an absolute packet! I think we can afford to pay off-"

Myra cut her off with a scowl as she pulled out into the street. They'd had this conversation before and it still hurt to try and explain it to her sister. "Tyler needs me to work out my contract, sweety. I can't quit until the end of the year, I signed a deal. They need-"

Kira cut her off angrily. " _ You _ need!  _ You _ need to just tell them, you can pay them off, I've got money now! They're mobsters, they'll take the money and get someone else!"

Myra just shook her head, not wanting to explain. She really didn't want to have to tell her child prodigy baby sis about her life, or the scumbags that controlled it. "Kira, honey, it's not like that. They don't let people out of contracts for anything, and some of the guys, you know, they got sweet on me, they say I look just like mom did back in the day when she was Breakdown's main squeeze. I can't walk out."

Kira wouldn't give it up. "I can pay. I've got money. I've got a superpower now. You know that, you're the only one who knows that! Why isn't it  _ enough _ !"

Myra looked sad, but she knew the answer, even if she really didn't want Kira to have to understand it.

"Money isn't enough to stop monsters, sweet girl. And this world is full of monsters."

-

Home was an apartment block, ten storeys high, on the other side of the river near the graveyard and abandoned cathedral where Dead Wright had his homebase. Fleetwood Heights was the home of the movers and players of Ratagan. The whole neighborhood was very exclusive. You had to be a complete scumbag to even be considered for permission to live here.

Kira and Myra rode the elevator, which had to be the only functional one left in the city, up to the eighth floor and their apartment. It was a quite large one, with space for her mom and dad and all five of the kids. But it was a mess, as always. Helen, nine years old and autistic, was a tiny blonde bombshell who ran the childminders Kira paid for ragged every day. Jordan, the toddler, was almost as bad at age three. Her big brother Jordan would be out, somewhere, doing god-knew-what to the-devil-knew-who. Mom, Lauren, would be on night shift again - Dead Wight kept nocturnal hours. And her dad Gyle would be working, which mostly seemed to involve getting drunk with his cronies in the mob, sometimes travelling to meet old buddies for more drinking in the big cities. 

It was eleven o'clock by the time they got inside. Myra went for the first shower as Kira went to her room. She had the biggest bedroom of all five kids, and the corner spot with two windows to boot. It was just one more perk of being the family princess. She dumped her bag on the bed, carefully pulled her textbooks out and slotted them into her bedroom bookcase, then turned around to find Helen, a tiny blue-eyed blonde clone of Myra, sitting on her chair with her knees drawn up under her chin, looking at her. She looked tired, and it was way past her bedtime.

"Hello Kira."

Kira sighed, although she felt better for seeing her."Hi, little sis. You should be in bed by now."

She shook her head, hair flying. "Don't want to. Can I play with you?"

Kira sat down on her bed and stared into her kid sister's big, dreamy eyes. "You need to go. To. Sleep."

The firm tone failed miserably. "Play."

Kira rallied. "Helen."

Helena voice rose in complete as she looked, accusingly, at Kira. "I want to play with you. You're always at school. We never play anymore."

What could she say to that? Kira winced at the shot to her heart, and surrendered. She stepped across the room, picked up her little sister, sat her on her knee and pulled a hairbrush out of her desk. Helen poked and played with the junkyard of failed projects on Kira's worktop as she brushed her hair.

When she finally put Helen back to bed, Kira sat down and logged into Toybox again. It was past midnight, but she needed to find another contract to work on quickly. And found the buyer had posted  _ more _ questions. And a request to meet, which went against all the rules!

Even the Middleman, who presumably had bigger fish to fry, had attached a brief note reminding her that she shouldn't give out identifying details to anyone and certainly shouldn't meet the buyer herself. Kira wrote a brief but coldly polite reply declining the idea of meeting, but started going through the questions again. They wanted to be sure she wouldn't claim patient rights, they wanted her to nominate a law firm they could contact outside Toybox who could handle "any legal issues that arise over ownership..." 

She was getting a little worried about the deal. Her download had everything the buyer needed to recreate her compound and equipment, but they kept asking questions! She didn't know anything about the buyer. They could be anyone. The money had been paid to Middleman, she'd done her part, it was all over until the Middleman did his own test and confirmed her design worked. But it was a big contract, the kind she wanted to work on. Kira wasn't sure this kind of nitpicking detail work wasn't normal. She answered the questions, and, reluctantly, went looking for a law firm she could use as a cutout outside of Toybox. It took two hours to find one in Kansas City she felt was big enough and secure enough to be safe and then set up an account with them. She went to bed around three in morning, exhausted. 

\--

The next day dragged by slowly. Kira finished registering with the law firm in Kansas City as soon as she got up, sent the details off to the client, then went for breakfast. Helen and Gordon were already sat at the breakfast table eating, the first of two hired nannys Kira paid for, Wendy, having got them up and ready for school already. Having the money to hire help was already making a huge difference to her younger sibling's lives, even as their mom got more and more withdrawn. 

Mom was back, sitting, exhausted and slumped over on the breakfast bar in the kitchen behind her kids, watching them with hooded eyes. She already had a drink in her hands and her face looked... pained. Kira still didn't know, really, what her mom had done, or did do, for Dead Wright. She spent long hours away from home, and never talked about it. Kira had grown up looking after herself, feeding and cleaning up after Jordan and Myra, and then Helen and Gordon, even as she started to excel in school. 

Mom had never been great at maternal things. She forgot mealtimes, she yelled when she was tired, and she didn't know how to comfort them when they hurt. Kira knew she loved them. She was just... mom. Mom had always fixed things with her fists and with yelling. She didn't know how to cope with kids.

Even at forty five years old and after five kids, her mom was a tense, blonde, whipcord thin bundle of coiled wire, muscle and energy. She worked out, obsessively, for hours. Some of Kira's earliest memories were sitting on a gym mat, playing with Jordan and Myra, while her mom sweated through endless pullups and crunches. She drank too much and yelled too often, and never stopped fighting with Jordan about him running with the street-gangs and breaking the law. 

The worst thing was the better Kira did in school, the more her mom seemed to close herself off from her and the kids. It had been getting worse too, because now Kira had hired childminders and nannies for Helen and Gordon, Mom was neglecting them as well. It let her escape too easily, avoiding the responsibility she'd never known how to deal with, and it drove Kira insane. Her baby brother and sister were being raised by strangers in their own home and mom was apparently ok with that. 

  
  


Kira checked Toybox after she finished breakfast. The money still hadn't cleared yet, probably because it was such a tiny deal compared to the multi-million dollar sales that routinely went through the Toybox forums. Gadgeteer created tech could do almost anything, everyone wanted it, and people were willing to pay serious money for it. She barely ranked as a gadgeteer, and still she was making money.

Myra drove her to college before she went to work, dropping her off in the square outside with a cheerful wave. Kira went to her first lecture, bounced back to the library, cruised the Toybox for new ideas or contracts, and studied. 

The mail she'd been waiting for dropped half an hour before she finished her last class.

_ Test run complete. Formula and equipment achieves specified result. Transaction approved. Two hundred thousand dollars have been deposited in your account. _

Kira practically bounced off the walls.

-

She walked, skipped, and hopped out the college building, across the square, and past eight blocks of urban decay with a happy song in her head.

Two cop cars were parked outside the Hellcat, while an ambulance and crew tended to a couple of complaining patrons in the carpark. They'd been another fight, clearly. They tended to happen about once a week, bringing the cops and ambulance service racing. Considering Dead Wright paid most of their salaries these days it was hardly surprising that he got good service.

Henry wasn't on the door. When she tried to walk to the employee carpark a cop, a fat, officious guy in uniform drinking coffee, held up his hand to stop her. He scowled at her school-bag and glasses. "Hey kid, scram. This ain't a daycare, you understand?"

Kira sighed, looking around. Aside from the fat git, the other two cops and a pair of guys in white scrubs had assembled a scaffold in front of the front door and were clambering around the sign over the door, doing... something. There was some damage up there on the wall, like something had been thrown at it from inside. She couldn't see much, with the guys working on it and the broken neon sign covering the damage.

Kira looked back at the cop again. "Where's Henry? The door guy, you know?"

The cop looked surprised at her, almost spilling his coffee as he added a shot of something to it from a hip flask. "Oh, you know him? He took a hit, these two new guys in town started kicking off and smacked him one on the face. He's at the hospital."

Kira's eyes widened. "Damn, I thought he was a brick!"

The lardass cop shrugged, and dipped his donut before taking a bite. "Yeah, but these guys had some real muscle, Henry's only a D class, you know? He was bleeding pretty hard."

Kira felt molten lead pool in her stomach. "Did anybody else get hurt?"

The cop shrugged, wiping crumbs off his chin. "Oh yeah, some stripper on stage caught a hit, knocked her ass first through a wall, right over the door." He sniggered. "Look at that." 

Kira rotated on the spot like a broken marionette and looked. The wood and plaster wall over the door was cracked and broken. The sign had been dislodged. And behind the two medics in white scrubs was a body, with a pair of long, shapely legs dangling from the torso still lodged in the wall. A sparkly high heeled shoe hung from one limp foot.

The cop held out his hands like he was framing a picture and grinned. "Just a fine pair of legs sticking out of a neat little hole in the wall, right over the front door. Get this, her stage name was "Glory". Ha, they're sayin they should rename the place the "Gloryhole". He chuckled to himself and swilled more coffee behind her.

Kira looked at her sister's corpse, watched as the two EMT's began extracting her from the broken wall. One of them cracked a joke; the other shook his head, rebuking his partner but still smiling at the gag. The cop said something, but she ignored it. Eventually he wandered off and left her standing there. 

Kira just.... waited. For something to happen. She was watching her sister's body be manhandled down from the wall of the strip club she'd been forced to work in, surely there should be something, something vast and violent, she should feel or do? She just felt impossibly cold. And numb. And.... that was it. Even when they pulled her out, and Kira saw the giant gaping wound in Myra's torso, and the shock of seeing Myra's dead face ran through her, it was just ice piled on top of more ice. 

She'd died. Myra was dead. Her sister, her big sister, was never going to exist again. Never talk to her, moan at her, comfort her, drive her home, never say anything, think anything, feel anything ever, ever again. 

They were going to make jokes about how she died. She was going to be a punchline, a funny picture on the internet, a stripper blown ass first through the strip club wall, legs a'kimbo, one shoe still on, right over the doorway. It looked like a particularly tasteless bit of advertising for the club. Like a comedy billboard. Her sister's corpse.

Ah, Kira thought, mind lost amidst a towering mountain of ice, there it is. Rage. Heat, rising slowly from the pit of her stomach, defrosting the ice in her gut, melting her limbs, unsticking her mind. She was grateful for it, because without it she thought she might have frozen to death. Rage, at what they would do to Myra's memory. Rage at what they had already done. Kira felt loss, and shock, and grief, and she could do nothing but endure them. But Rage she could express. Rage she could live with. Rage gave her something to do beyond grieving for her sister. Rage gave her  _ purpose _ .

She was going to kill some people. A lot of people. Enough people to melt this numb coldness out of her heart again.

\---

Kira sat in the lab of the city college, scanning the open offers posting board of Toybox, looking for something she could build. She still needed fourteen million - pain flashed across her face. No, she didn't. She needed  _ twelve _ million dollars by next year. 

Mom had gotten drunk. Dad hadn't stopped shouting all night, at mom for letting Myra work in the Hellcat, at Jordan for not looking after his sister, even snapping at Helen and Gordon for nothing at all. He'd snarled and bellowed at everyone but Kira. Helen had spent all day crying in Myra's room, wrapped in her biggest sister's bedsheets. Gordon ran around, sometimes hugging Kira and Helen, sometimes hiding behind his mom's legs, crying and yelling because everyone else was crying and yelling. 

Dad had stormed out, slamming the door behind him as his buddies collected him. Jordan had tried to follow him, but been kicked out. Instead he'd gone out to meet his gangbanger friends to "do something about it". Kira had no idea what either her dad or her brother thought they were going to do. Mom ended up drinking on the sofa, hugging Gordon and Helen until she vomited and passed out. Kira had put the kids to bed. Then she went online and found two professional grief counsellors, because Gordon and Helen would need someone who was better at this than what mom or dad was likely to offer.

She still needed money. Still needed to get her family out before their past caught up and killed them. Her power was the only thing that could save them. And it wasn't strong enough.

The Toybox forums were full of jobs she couldn't do. Power armour. She'd tried and failed, her gift sputtering out before she'd assembled the first servo-motor. People were offering five, ten million dollars for better sensor packs, when she had struggled to build a thermal camera. Hundreds of requests for ideas for improvements in power storage. Someone was offering fifty million dollars if anyone could build a cold fusion battery small enough to fit in a portable backpack. Kira didn't have a clue where to start something like that.

She needed twelve million dollars. In a year. A million dollars a month. She'd managed three hundred thousand in three months. The math didn't work out to having six living family members by the end of next year.

She wasn't likely to earn it. That left stealing it. She'd hated the thought of becoming a supervillain before. Now it just felt like refusing to lower herself to crime had been stupidly self-indulgent. A supervillain Kira wouldn't have a dead sister to bury.

Kira considered the problem. If there actually was twelve million dollars in cash anywhere in this crappy, run-down, crime infested city, it was in the pocket of Dead Wright. Even that wasn't a sure thing. Ratagan City had been stuck in a rut since the nineteen sixties, when the steel mills on the river shut down and most of the heavy industry left. Dead Wright wasn't here because of the rich pickings, he was here because he was too lazy to fight for a better territory and too arrogant to work for anyone else. 

It wasn't like she didn't know the guy. Dead Wright had been running the city for fifty years, and her mom had been a minion for him for two decades before Kira was born. He wasn't a monster, as such. Just an old, lazy, greedy, dried-up walking dead-man, who liked to live the good life and didn't bother too much about what it cost everyone else. He liked to think he was a family guy, and he'd turn up at the annual Halloween street parties to frighten the kiddies and hand out sweets. Kira had sat on his knee a couple of times when he played Santa at the mall. He always wore silk suits, he covered his mummified face with colourful, handmade paper mache party masks, and he laughed a lot. 

Dead Wright had the body of a preserved corpse. He could summon the dead, age the living and stitch himself back up no matter what anyone did to him. He kept the bodies of dead superhumans in caskets, stood around his home, because he could enslave them and still have them use their powers as well. He would have been a national nightmare if he'd had any ambition at all, but Dead Wright hadn't really done anything worse than keep the crime rate in the city so high that nobody would invest any money in the place. He kept the streets peaceful, if not exactly safe, and took a cut of everything that happened in the city. He kept the place going, but both the city and Dead Wright had been rotting for years. The economy was nonexistent, beyond crime and welfare. A zombie city with a zombie running it, everyone said it.

  
  


Kira sat on the lab stool in front of her laptop, scrolling down Toybox's free posting forum, looking for things she could use. Armour, weapons, simple and lightweight. Almost useless. Kira was a fourteen year old nerd, her only exercise routine was running around a thirty square foot laboratory. She wasn't going to win a fight against a stiff breeze, let alone a bunch of Dead Wright's minions. Not that she'd ever try, considering most of those minions were people whose kids she'd chased around the playground at school. Her  _ mom _ was a minion for Dead Wright. 

Toybox had a terrifying amount of weaponry schematics. Three quarters of everything posted seemed designed to do something horrible to somebody else. Her power began to pop and fizzle madly in the back of her head at the thought of building them. It wanted to create havoc, and she'd been trying to make it invent cleaning fluids.....

Kira found a spider drone. Simple, mostly off the shelf parts she could order and modify. Fifty centimetres wide, very quiet. Her brain started redesigning it before she realised what she was doing, and she quickly ordered the materials with a priority tag. Petty, small, limited she may be, she was still a true Gadgeteer. The thought of creating something new sparkled in her brain like an irresistible compulsion.

A drone would work. Sneaky, deceptive. Concealed. She searched for a portable holographic projector and found hundreds, entire forum groups of people discussing and designing miniaturized, weaponized holograms and how to use them. She grabbed a dozen of the best designs and ordered another ten thousand dollars worth of parts by priority freight. 

She should build a weapon. Kira shuddered at the thought, but somewhere in her gut the anger purred at the thought. She should have already built something lethal. She should have already killed Tyler, and the other scumbags who had killed Myra. She needed to find them first. She didn't even know their names, although her dad could and would find out... but Dead Wright had her dad in a vice. He wouldn't tell Kira, either, not his golden girl. He wouldn't want her involved.

Kira bit her lip hard enough to draw blood and forced herself to stop. She had to focus on the money. She didn't want to. She wanted vengeance. But her mom, her dad, her brothers, Helen... 

Kira wanted to kill someone. She wanted to build weapons, she wanted to let the bubbling, sparkling power in her head out. Her power hadn't felt like this for months, instead just a dull ache that built up as she was on commissions for other people. It wanted this, to be let out of the box, to build something new, something, terrible. 

Kira looked down and discovered she'd just spent another fifty thousand dollars ordering parts. Her bank account was now a negative ten grand.

"Shit." She cursed and slumped onto the keyboard. She'd have to sell something. Build something, sell it, get more cash... she needed to have money ready, she needed to plan ahead. 

She was sitting in an empty lab. She had no materials, no money to spend, no schematics she could trade. She was done here.

She really, really didn't want to go home.

\-----

  
  


Jordan was home when she walked in the door, sprawled out on the sofa watching Gordon play with his toys on the rug in front of him. Big, muscled, seventeen years old, he had broad shoulders and a mane of long blond hair that he didn't clean often enough. He looked tired and hungover, wearing a dirty sweatshirt from last night. Errol, the afternoon childminder, sat in a corner of the room, looking tense. Kira doubted Jordan had been polite to the guy, although today she couldn't make herself care. Her brother was staring at their little bro with dull reddened eyes. Kira could see bruises on his face and arms.

"Hey." She said, dumping her bag and closing the door behind her. 

He rolled slightly, not taking his eyes off Gordon. "Hey."

She stood behind him as they watched their kid brother play for a while. 

After a little time a question seemed to occur to Jordan. "How'd you get home?" He asked listlessly. 

"Taxi." She shrugged. She hadn't needed Myra to give her a lift for a while, really. She just liked it. Had liked it.

"Oh." He said. He seemed to think about it for a while, then rolled over and looked at her. "I need some cash."

She met his eyes, briefly. Thought about trying to attach some conditions, try to bargain. She couldn't bring herself to believe it would work, in the end. She knew he'd do whatever he felt he needed to do regardless of what he told her. He'd steal the money from someone else if she said no. "Sure." She shrugged.

"Going out." He said, turning back to look at Gordon. Kira winced.

"You should stay. Mom-"

He cut her off hard and angry. " _ Fuck _ mom." 

"Mom needs us." Kira tried. It was true, even if it didn't feel like it.

"Mom. Jesus." He rolled his eyes. She knew what he meant. Jordan had seen more and worse from their mom than Kira had. He'd gotten here first, after all.

Kira swallowed. She couldn't let him go out without a fight. She wanted him home. "I need my big brother, Jordan. Stay." She felt her eyes tearing up again. "Please."

He didn't look at her, rolled off the sofa and stood, six foot two inches tall and ashamed of himself. "I have to go." Kira stood there as he grabbed his coat, looked at her awkwardly then looked at her bag. She was barely able to wave permission as she slumped against the back of the sofa. He picked up her bag, pulled out her purse, took some cash out. He didn't look at her before he left.

‐-


End file.
